On Salesforce's Wave Platform And Why Semantic Debates About Analytics Are Irrelevant

During the Salesforce.com DreamForce conference this year (disclosure, Salesforce covered my travel and expenses to attend), the company announced Wave, it’s so-called “analytics cloud” product. Wave fills a significant gap in Salesforce’s arsenal, indeed at last year’s event I asked CEO Marc Benioff directly about the obvious failings in the analytics area. He was naturally vague, and this year we saw that issue amended.

What fascinated me about the launch however were the discussions in the analyst room afterwards. These discussions were typified by some cantankerous and, frankly, arrogant industry pundits pouring scorn on Wave because it didn’t meet some bar they unilaterally set for products to be considered analytics. “It’s just visualizations” was a common refrain. Don't get me wrong, those claiming that Wave is (in this iteration at least) more visualization that it is true analytics are largely correct. But the key thing here is that it really doesn’t matter. And a look at the Wave opportunity, and partner demands, shows why.

After I wrote a story detailing Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s “accidental” leaking of the Wave news, I jumped on an airplane for 12 hours to travel to the event. When I landed there were close to 100 emails in my inbox from partners and customers about Wave. A handful of these were from vendors that one can class as damaged by the introduction of Wave. These customers were quick to point out the failings of the product, and the holes in its functionality. The other 90% of emails however were effusive in their praise – detailing just how important this move is, how it fills a need that exists right now and how it will be leveraged by customers and partners alike.

Maybe it’s because Wave was an unusual Salesforce launch in that it meets a current need rather than a future one. When Chatter was introduced, for example, Salesforce had to spend significant time explaining why enterprise social networking was of any importance to customers. The pricing didn’t help any but uptake was slow for reasons beyond economics – customers didn’t know what it was and how to use it.

Wave is fundamentally different to that – every Salesforce customer can use good visualizations on their data today. There’s no learning curve or aspirational story to tell here – it fills a hole that was obviously apparent. Maybe the collected punditry find it hard to accept a Salesforce that is, unusually, skating to where the puck is today, rather than where it will be tomorrow.

Some partner quotes indicate the opportunity here for customers and partners alike. From George Mathew, COO of data analytics company Alteryx:

It’s exciting to see Salesforce introduce an analytics cloud that’s more naturally embedded to their product suite. From a business standpoint, these capabilities drive more stickiness to their platform… Data blending is one of the hottest areas of growth in the analytics market; we see a natural affinity to the dashboarding and visual analysis in Salesforce Wave

Ray Smith, CE of Datahug:

We are entering the era of data-driven sales. Wave is a confirmation of that trend and will help to make it accessible to a much wider population… partners provide insights from lead scoring (Infer) to customer success (Gainsight). A combination of analytics will provide more nuanced and accurate results. For example an Inside Sales
Team could start their day with leads with a high Infer score but a low Datahug Communications Score, in other words high potential leads with whom the team has had little contact. In Customer Success, a low Communication Score could be combined with other metrics to predict which customers need more attention to ensure that they will renew

The Salesforce Wave Analytics announcement underscores the fact that cloud, mobile, social, and analytics are driving forces in business software today. But these forces go way beyond sales. They affect the entire company, from R&D, to operations, to HR, to – our company’s focus – finance and accounting. It’s exciting to see companies of all sizes taking advantage of cloud business analytics to transform their management cultures, accelerate growth, and improve competitiveness

The focus is on user experience for the "rest of us", i.e. not traditional data analysts, but every day business users. Salesforce analytics capabilities have historically been limited and this is a step forward to address that

Gaurav Rewari, CEO fo Numerify:

Just as in the on-premises world, business intelligence and enterprise performance management emerged as an overlay market on top of key, fragmented operational applications. Similarly we are seeing the mainstreaming of cloud analytics, as indicated by Salesforce Wave, in the second chapter of the cloud adoption by businesses.

You get the idea – Wave fills an important gap, provides significant partner opportunity and delivers real value to customers. What’s not to like?

Of course there are issues – Wave’s pricing (‘builder’ pricing at $250/user/month and ‘explorer’ pricing at $125/user/month) is steep. It’s not at a level that screams “deploy to all of your users” from the rooftops. Wave also lacks a lot of robustness when it comes to actually loading external data – this is a task that Salesforce is currently farming out to third party partners – Informatica for example. But these are short term issues – Salesforce will iterate on the pricing and build out the functional robustness of the product.

In the mean time it will be adopted (albeit probably less widely than Salesforce likely hopes for) and will materially add to Salesforce revenues. More importantly it will create another series of partners and products that leverage the Salesforce platform to deliver value to customers. That’s what an ecosystem looks like and Salesforce has proven that when it comes to creating ecosystems, it is a force to be reckoned with.